'Star Wars: Last Jedi': The Secret Of Luke's Exile & More

We are less than five months away from “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” and as it usually goes, any news about the secretive film’s plot is met with major attention. Disney has been doing a great job at hiding any story details. However, for fans, today brought a bounty of new information as Entertainment Weekly has unearthed some intriguing new tidbits that will undoubtedly stir plenty of speculation about what’s to come in the eighth movie in the saga.

READ MORE:  Luke Is “Overpowered With Regret” In ‘The Last Jedi,’ See New Images From The Movie

It’s no surprise that director Rian Johnson‘s biggest task was to find a backstory as to what exactly happened to Luke after the events of  “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi,” and it seems it wasn’t a very happy ending after all, as Luke is now in exile, still haunted by his last apprentice, Kylo Ren, having gone rogue to the dark side.

“The very first step in the writing of this was figuring out why he’s on that island. We know that he is not a coward. He’s not just hiding because he’s scared. But we also know that he must know his friends are in danger. He must know the galaxy needs him. And he’s sitting on this island in the middle of nowhere. There had to be an answer. It had to be something where Luke Skywalker believes he’s doing the right thing – and the process of figuring out what that is and unpacking it is the journey for Rey,” Johnson said.

More specifically, ‘The Last Jedi’ will have Rey trying to convince Luke to make a comeback, which will, we all assume, eventually lead to Luke training her to battle Kylo. What’s holding Luke back? As previously mentioned, Luke’s past with Kylo still lingers in his conscience.

“[Luke] made a huge mistake in thinking that his nephew was the chosen one, so he invested everything he had in Kylo, much like Obi-Wan did with my character, and he is betrayed, with tragic consequences. Luke feels responsible for that. That’s the primary obstacle he has to rejoining the world and his place in the Jedi hierarchy, you know? It’s that guilt, that feeling that it’s his fault, that he didn’t detect the darkness in him until it was too late,” Hamill said.

Mark Hamill hasn’t been shy in saying he wasn’t on board at first with the trajectory Johnson had for Luke in “The Last Jedi,” he now further elaborates how he felt about it (see the video below). As for the backstory that lead to Luke’s isolation on the island? Hamill says don’t expect the film to reveal too many details.

“There’s massive amounts of backstory that is left to your imagination and I couldn’t do my job without figuring out what that was. Since it’s not really important to the main story as a whole a lot of it is just for my own process. I talked with Rian about it and went into this elaborate scenario of what happened to Luke after the end of the ‘Return of the Jedi,’ ” he added.

It seems that ‘The Last Jedi’ will be bringing a story of redemption, a theme as old as time and something that will likely be the driving force of the movie. If ‘The Force Awakens’ focused on Hans Solo (to an extent), we can probably expect Luke Skywalker to be major focal point of ‘The Last Jedi,’ which, sadly, leads us to believe that Leia would have been the driving force of director Colin Trevorrow‘s third and final installment. But that’s a whole other story, which is being dealt with as we speak with the recent addition of British writer Jack Thorne re-writing episode 9’s screenplay.

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” opens on December 15th.